It usually begins as relief. Something took the edge off on a night that was too much, and it worked, and that is the entire hook. It worked.

For some men it is drinking. For some it is smoking. For some it is pills that started legitimately. For some it is a woman, or the scroll, or the pornography, or the gambling, or the game system until four in the morning.

And for some it is work. Fourteen hours a day, called responsibility, doing exactly the same job as the bottle.

The category is not the point. The point is that there is something you reach for when the feeling gets too big, and you have never once said out loud what it is.

Whatever it is, it takes time, money, and attention out of the same account your child is drawing on. There is one account. There has never been more than one.

It also takes you out of the room while you are still in it. A father who is high, drunk, absorbed, or three hours into a phone is physically present and functionally gone, and children experience that as absence, not as relaxation.

Then there is what it makes you afterward. Short. Irritable. Ashamed. And shame sends men further into whatever they were already using, which is the loop, and the loop is why people who are not weak stay stuck for years.

None of this makes you a bad man. It makes you a man carrying something with a tool that does not work.

Do not go straight to stopping. Go to what it is for.

Numbing is a solution to something. Find out what. It is usually one of a short list. I cannot sleep. I cannot sit still with what I did. I am angry all the time. I am terrified and there is nobody to say it to.

When you know what it is for, you can go looking for something that does that job and does not cost your child anything. That may be a person, a practice, a room full of men, a doctor, or God, and for most men it turns out to be more than one of those.

You are not going to think your way out of this alone. Everything you have tried alone is what got you here.

There is a line, and men are the last to see it in themselves. When you have tried to stop and could not. When it is costing you money you needed. When you use it in the morning. When people who love you have stopped saying anything about it because they gave up.

That is not a discipline problem and no amount of manning up will fix it. That is a thing you get help for, the same way you would get a bone set.

Your facilitator has the names and numbers. Ask after the session if you do not want to ask in front of the room. That is completely acceptable and it happens every cycle.

Getting help for this is not the opposite of being a strong father. For some of you it is the single largest fathering act available to you right now.